Espresso and the Cat Maid
A peaceful afternoon.
Sunlight glittered across the lakeshore beyond the window. Whenever those scattered shards of light on the water caught my eye, it felt as if an angel were lowering a single beam of salvation onto me, stuck working in the middle of nowhere's nowhere. Of course, what came down in place of an angel would be magical girls.
I was lazily wiping a café table with the cloth in my hand when a familiar presence reached me from the entrance. I turned. Someone was ambling over, cat ears twitching as she let out a yawn.
"You're early today."
"Haaahm—don't even start, nyang. I left the paperwork with a familiar, and you wouldn't believe what happened. You couldn't imagine it if you tried, nyang."
This magical cat's name was Shinano Catus. Force a translation out of it and you got something like a cactus by the river. She was, however, the owner of the Witches' Gathering, and a very important person indeed—someone who had served more than ten years as an active magical girl before slipping away into administrative work.
The lower half of the jersey outfit she insisted was a maid uniform was hidden so completely beneath the hem that it was impossible to tell whether she was wearing anything under it at all, and her bare legs caught the afternoon sun inside the café and shone faintly. It had been quite a shock the first time I saw it. It was still a shock. More astonishing than the outfit, though, was the fact that the person drooping her cat ears like that, worn to the bone, had once been a magical girl who soared through the sky with the cheers of tens of thousands at her back. Magical girls were said to keep the looks of an eternal high school girl forever, whether ten years passed or twenty, but fatigue, at least, she couldn't beat. The exhaustion had weighed on her eyelids until they looked doubled.
She dropped into the chair in front of the counter, stretched both arms out across the table, and gave her cat ears a little shiver.
"No present today for your hardworking boss-nyang?"
The tips of her ears tipped forward, ever so slightly, as if full of expectation.
"Yes... one cup, for Supervisor Shinano, crushed flat by exhaustion."
I turned and stood before the espresso machine. Espresso ought to do. I locked in the portafilter and pressed the brew button, and the machine began to hum low. While the thick crema settled slowly over the cup, the warm scent of fresh beans spread through the crisp mountain air.
Still... I couldn't just hand her straight espresso, could I? Only the other day she had made a fuss, as only someone with cat ears would, about hot things burning her tongue. I set the finished espresso down and opened the refrigerator. Cold air brushed the back of my hand as I took out the cream and laid a little over the cup, and the white cream settling gently across the deep brown looked like a cloud floating on the lake.
I carried it over and offered it across the counter.
"Espresso con panna... that is, a coffee for our supervisor."
The moment Shinano took the cup, her drooping ears shot upright. She brought the tip of her nose just above the cream, sniffed like a cat, and narrowed her eyes.
"...You pass, nyang."
With those words, even her tail was swaying from side to side. I slung the cloth over my shoulder, stepped back behind the counter, and looked out at the lakeshore once more.
While Shinano sipped her espresso, I quietly opened the refrigerator again. The macarons, cooled all the way through, sat neatly on their plate—pale lavender, soft pink, mint. Colors that looked as if just seeing them might lift your mood a little. I chose a few, set them on a plate, and passed them across the counter.
"Have some with it. I figured you'd need a snack more than a drink."
Shinano looked down at the plate, and her drooping ears slowly perked up.
"The kitty didn't forget I've got a cat's tongue. You cooled it with cream."
Her tail swayed slowly from side to side.
"You've got a delicate side, nyang. You're a hundred times better than the Magical Girl Association's clumsy admin staff, or the familiars, nyang."
I couldn't tell whether that was praise, but judging by the way her ears leaned forward, it was closer to praise than not. Shinano set the cup down and picked up a macaron.
"Thanks to you, there's a little sugar reaching my brain, so I've found just a tiny bit of courage to look at that pile of paperwork again, nyang."
She munched.
"The Association had an unusual number of headaches show up today, nyang."
"All the way from the Association to here?"
I set the cloth on the counter as I asked.
"It's not as if the Association is close enough that you'd come out here just to help with the work."
Association headquarters was in the Capital, and this place took more than an hour by car to reach. Of course, I knew that distance was fairly meaningless to magical girls. Shinano nibbled what was left of the macaron and let out a small snort.
"It's because it isn't close that I bothered coming all the way here, nyang."
She propped her chin on one hand and went on, tracing with her fingertips the cup where sweet cream and bitter espresso had mixed.
"Hide in a café or a break room near the Association building, and the broadcasters or the Association President will sniff you out like ghosts and shove a camera or a stack of paperwork in your face, nyang."
She slowly set down the emptied espresso cup.
"This place is quiet, and thanks to the lake the flow of mana is calm. It's the perfect spot for shaking off fatigue, nyang."
She stole the last smear of cream from the rim with a fingertip, licked it with the tip of her tongue like a cat, and narrowed her eyes.
"And the coffee you make isn't half bad, either."
Honestly, I didn't really follow the talk about mana flows and all the rest. A good place to run away to, though—that, I understood well enough.
"You think so?"
I took the empty cup, set it in the sink, and went on.
"Then I'm glad. From a magical girl's point of view it may be perfect, but did you know that an ordinary person like me has to hike down the mountain for over thirty minutes just to reach a convenience store?"
The ingredients I needed for coffee and snacks, and the miscellaneous things required for staying overnight here, Shinano procured for me. On that score I had no complaints. The problem was that what could pass for going out amounted to watching the world go by on a computer or a smartphone from the upstairs lodgings. It was that remote.
At the light grumbling that slipped out of me, Shinano's green eyes narrowed. A faint smile formed at her lips, and her tail began to move slowly from side to side, as if keeping a pleasant rhythm. Chin still propped on her hand, she stared up at me and spoke in a languid voice.
"Has the kitty ever let you go hungry, nyang? Has she ever made you sleep cold, nyang?"
Her ears tipped slightly back.
"Whenever you request supplies, I get you the very best on the spot, don't I, nyang?"
I couldn't argue with that. When I'd asked to switch coffee-bean brands, they really had arrived in two days, and when I'd said I needed a new espresso machine, it was up on the counter within a week. Shinano flicked the crumbs of the remaining macaron from her fingertips and gave a small snort.
"And the one who likes nothing better than poking around the internet on the second floor, watching the world go by, isn't very convincing when he suddenly starts whining about the convenience store at the foot of the mountain, nyang."
The tip of her tail tapped the counter.
"Give you lodgings in the middle of the city and you'd still be the type who never leaves his room, nyang."
A merciless assault by facts. It hurt more because she was right.
Shinano turned her gaze, chin still in her hand, and looked out the window. The lake, reflecting the sunlight, rippled quietly, and that light flowed gently across her green eyes.
"Besides, the city is exhausting, nyang."
Her voice dropped a tone.
"Aberrations popping out at the drop of a hat, and broadcasters shoving cameras in your face at all hours."
Her ears lay back, ever so slightly.
"It's a place where even an ordinary person like you never knows when danger might hit, nyang. A mountain with no people and a calm flow of mana is a hundred times safer, nyang."
A very fine thread of fatigue ran through her voice. At the same time, something like attachment to this place seeped through the gaps in that fatigue. A refuge chosen by someone who had flown for more than ten years between cameras, cheers, and Aberrations. That the refuge was this café in the mountains struck me, now and then, as strangely fitting.
Shinano turned her gaze back to me.
"So you are fated to stay quietly in this perfect middle of nowhere, as barista and bartender for the kitty and the tired ones, nyang."
It was a rather frightening thing to say. But the smile playing at her lips was the look of a cat with her guard down, shown only in front of a familiar part-timer. I rinsed the cup in the sink and let out a small sigh.
"...Yes. I understand."
Shinano's ears gave a satisfied little shiver.
Right, right... she treasures me so much, and yet the Association calls this place a front, so days are minimum wage and nights are only time and a half...
I let out a short scoff and cleared the empty plate.
That was when it happened.
Click. Click.
A sound that had no business on the old wooden floor of a mountain café broke the quiet: the sharp, polished strike of high heels. The person who opened the door and came in looked as if she alone had been cut out of some other scene and pasted onto the mountain. She was tall, with a curved figure, and long black hair that caught the sunlight spilled in a gleam over her shoulders. A black jacket, a miniskirt, and a designer handbag that looked expensive at a glance. Into a café that had been full of the scent of espresso, the smell of costly, refined perfume rushed in all at once. How to put it—she was someone whose backdrop ought to have been a downtown department store, not a lakeshore.
I straightened behind the counter and opened my mouth.
"Welcome. This is the Witches' Gathering. For the witches' precious time..."
The words tangled in my mouth.
"...Haa."
The sigh came out first.
"Welcome."
It was a line Shinano had ordered me to use, insisting it suited the atmosphere of the place, but honestly it was the sensibility of about twenty years ago, and just getting it out of my mouth was agony. The feeling of my tongue locking up on its own every time I had to say it probably wasn't going to be fixed in this lifetime.
The moment that cringeworthy line finally finished leaving my mouth, the corner of Shinano's mouth—she was sprawled across the table—curved up as if thoroughly delighted. Even her cat ears shivered with pleasure. She was clearly enjoying the simple fact of making me say it.
The magical girl stepping into the café, on the other hand, stopped dead. The click of her heels cut off, and the room went quiet again. She slowly removed the sunglasses hanging from her fingertips. The eyes revealed beneath them turned toward me. She looked back and forth between the part-timer standing behind the counter and the cat-eared supervisor sprawled on the table, wagging her tail, and her lips parted, just slightly. She hadn't said a word yet, but what she wanted to say was perfectly clear from her face alone.
What did I just hear?
I felt the same way. The only problem was that the person who had to say the line out loud, every single time, was me.
"Haa... what is that ancient greeting? Did I just walk onto the set of some old anime?"
She set her handbag down on a nearby table with a thud and sighed as if she'd had enough.